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Sissy by Ben Borek is the first book in the new Republic of Consciousness Prize bookclub which curates some of the finest fiction from small independent presses in the UK and Ireland and helps raise funds for this wonderful literary prize. See https://www.republicofconsciousness.com/book-of-the-month/ and https://www.patreon.com/republicofconsciousness
And it is also one of the first four fiction titles issued by a new publishing house:
Using [b:Don Juan|78249|Don Juan|Lord Byron|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311643640i/78249._SY75_.jpg|75564] as its inspiration, Sissy is a mock heroic epic poem of life in 21st century London.
Our eponymous hero is a 30-something office worker (physically in The City, somewhere off Cheapside, but not actually a bank), living in Lewisham. By day he is something of a wimp (hence the narrator's nickname for him), five foot nothing, with no romantic or sexual relationships and indeed such a mother's boy that he literally sleeps inside his mother's womb each night (yes, you did read that right). But by night, playing Second Life, he is Neno Brown, a gang boss to be feared.
A second story line concerns a North London household of leftish intellectual Eastern Europeans. One of their number is on a mission to find (quite how is never clear) the feet of thirteen dead pilots and repatriate them for burial. The men were all born in one West Ukraine village on the same day (but of different parents), each born with exactly seven toes. Having escaped both Soviet and Nazi troops in WW2, they fled to the UK where the took part, and died, in the Battle of Britain.
Another character is the same household is making a piece of performance art about Western men who hook up online with Eastern European women, and she entices Sissy to be her first victim/subject on the Slavic Beauties website.
And the novel's narrator, who lives on a barge based in Vauxhall, and himself has a strong foot fetish, isn't so much an omniscient narrator as one who is able to keep track of what is going on by transforming himself literally into a fly on the wall, or into an extra in a scene (e.g. the waiter in a restaurant where Sissy and his Slavia Beauty first meet) or hacking into Sissy's computer or via spycams concealed in geckos, all devices he uses to both advance the plot but also to voyeuristically watch the characters sleep, eat and have sex.
And all this is told in rhyming verse, with frequent digressions into brackets and lengthy footnotes (also in verse). It beings
I write this from my floating second home,
My calm retreat when Vauxhall’s sunny climes
Grow too hot-headed for my tender dome
(A vast cathedral full of golden chimes,
Which needs the river air to circulate
Throughout its sparkling naves, the placid weight
Of tidal-pull massaging from below
To let my fizzing cerebellum lull
Into a state where it is keen, but slow
And ready to compose). The gold-leaf hull
Now gently cuts the brown film of the Thames
And sprays a modest spindrift laced with gems
Of froth, which flicker, spectrum-like, to give
A billowing and nacreous effect
Encoded with the acronym ROYGBIV.
My second home, I wrote. You now suspect
I designate it thus to circumvent
A bill or two? But no. Our parliament
Has never seen my buttocks on its benches
(And if it ever did, the scarlet leather
Is where I’d sit, not in the squalid trenches
Of spin where any change in tabloid weather
Demands a shift in policy and speeches
As cloying as a plate of sugared leeches,
As tart as a carafe of puréed rind.)
So, no, my status is affirmed – your guide
Throughout this story, which shall soon unwind
For both of us – this is a real-time ride
Through disparate lives: a provident donation
From Calliope, I just take dictation.
I glide beneath the beams of Albert Bridge.
Adorned with blinking blubs, they rise in two
Loose cones to form an undulating ridge
Of fairy light which fights the spreading blue –
A battle that the thousand fading eyes
Are doomed to lose against the waking skies
With Sisyphean, quotidian recurrence,
This crepuscule is sacrosanct to me,
When London’s only effervescent currents
Are liquid and beneath me, when I’m free
To let my narrative, unbothered, rove
Through increments of indigo and mauve.
It is brilliant done and fascinating, although not that easy to follow given the elaborate prose and rather complex and magic-realist plot: I could have done with a simple prose introduction to each chapter ('In which are heroes....' style) or a reader's guide.
But the next best thing was this excellent review and introduction from the RoC Prize's own James Tookey: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy/
One to look out for on next year's RoC Prize. 3.5 stars
Further extracts:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy-extract/
(the opening chapter)
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2012/09/from-sissy-by-ben-borek.html
(the tale of the 13 young men)
And it is also one of the first four fiction titles issued by a new publishing house:
Boiler House Press is a new publisher of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and everything in-between.Sissy certainly breaks the mould, albeit follows to an extent in the footsteps of the author's previous cult novel-in-verse Donjong Heights (2008).
We are based at the University of East Anglia, home of the world-renowned Creative Writing MA, and a burgeoning world centre for creative-critical writing studies.
We are passionate about writing that breaks a mould; that surprises; that plays with-and-between the creative and the critical. We want to open and excite your mind.
Using [b:Don Juan|78249|Don Juan|Lord Byron|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311643640i/78249._SY75_.jpg|75564] as its inspiration, Sissy is a mock heroic epic poem of life in 21st century London.
Our eponymous hero is a 30-something office worker (physically in The City, somewhere off Cheapside, but not actually a bank), living in Lewisham. By day he is something of a wimp (hence the narrator's nickname for him), five foot nothing, with no romantic or sexual relationships and indeed such a mother's boy that he literally sleeps inside his mother's womb each night (yes, you did read that right). But by night, playing Second Life, he is Neno Brown, a gang boss to be feared.
A second story line concerns a North London household of leftish intellectual Eastern Europeans. One of their number is on a mission to find (quite how is never clear) the feet of thirteen dead pilots and repatriate them for burial. The men were all born in one West Ukraine village on the same day (but of different parents), each born with exactly seven toes. Having escaped both Soviet and Nazi troops in WW2, they fled to the UK where the took part, and died, in the Battle of Britain.
Another character is the same household is making a piece of performance art about Western men who hook up online with Eastern European women, and she entices Sissy to be her first victim/subject on the Slavic Beauties website.
And the novel's narrator, who lives on a barge based in Vauxhall, and himself has a strong foot fetish, isn't so much an omniscient narrator as one who is able to keep track of what is going on by transforming himself literally into a fly on the wall, or into an extra in a scene (e.g. the waiter in a restaurant where Sissy and his Slavia Beauty first meet) or hacking into Sissy's computer or via spycams concealed in geckos, all devices he uses to both advance the plot but also to voyeuristically watch the characters sleep, eat and have sex.
And all this is told in rhyming verse, with frequent digressions into brackets and lengthy footnotes (also in verse). It beings
I write this from my floating second home,
My calm retreat when Vauxhall’s sunny climes
Grow too hot-headed for my tender dome
(A vast cathedral full of golden chimes,
Which needs the river air to circulate
Throughout its sparkling naves, the placid weight
Of tidal-pull massaging from below
To let my fizzing cerebellum lull
Into a state where it is keen, but slow
And ready to compose). The gold-leaf hull
Now gently cuts the brown film of the Thames
And sprays a modest spindrift laced with gems
Of froth, which flicker, spectrum-like, to give
A billowing and nacreous effect
Encoded with the acronym ROYGBIV.
My second home, I wrote. You now suspect
I designate it thus to circumvent
A bill or two? But no. Our parliament
Has never seen my buttocks on its benches
(And if it ever did, the scarlet leather
Is where I’d sit, not in the squalid trenches
Of spin where any change in tabloid weather
Demands a shift in policy and speeches
As cloying as a plate of sugared leeches,
As tart as a carafe of puréed rind.)
So, no, my status is affirmed – your guide
Throughout this story, which shall soon unwind
For both of us – this is a real-time ride
Through disparate lives: a provident donation
From Calliope, I just take dictation.
I glide beneath the beams of Albert Bridge.
Adorned with blinking blubs, they rise in two
Loose cones to form an undulating ridge
Of fairy light which fights the spreading blue –
A battle that the thousand fading eyes
Are doomed to lose against the waking skies
With Sisyphean, quotidian recurrence,
This crepuscule is sacrosanct to me,
When London’s only effervescent currents
Are liquid and beneath me, when I’m free
To let my narrative, unbothered, rove
Through increments of indigo and mauve.
It is brilliant done and fascinating, although not that easy to follow given the elaborate prose and rather complex and magic-realist plot: I could have done with a simple prose introduction to each chapter ('In which are heroes....' style) or a reader's guide.
But the next best thing was this excellent review and introduction from the RoC Prize's own James Tookey: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy/
One to look out for on next year's RoC Prize. 3.5 stars
Further extracts:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy-extract/
(the opening chapter)
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2012/09/from-sissy-by-ben-borek.html
(the tale of the 13 young men)
Sissy works in London. He's timid and shy. He lives with his mother and at night he crawls inside her womb (where he has a desk, wi-fi, a computer) and each morning is literally re-birthed. Yes, you read that correctly. In the evenings, from his computer, he logs onto the Second Earth videogame and plays a mean gangster called Neno Brown. Feeling lonely, he decides to try and find love on the Slavic Beauties website.
Meanwhile, a group of leftist Polish intellectuals in London constitute the main sub-plots. One of them, Wassily, is attempting to find and take back to Poland the feet of several dead Polish ex-servicemen, each of whom had seven toes, so that he can bury and repatriate the feet. Another of the group embarks on an art project to ensnare unsuspecting men and record their sexual adventures.
All of this is narrated by a shape-shifting narrator with a foot fetish who lives in a houseboat, and it is all also written in rhyming sesta rima poetry, which lets Borek quote Eliot, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Larkin and plenty more besides.
There's so much for a reader to get excited about here, so much imagination and so many rich ideas at work about masculinity, the internet, art, the experience of Polish immigrants; but I should say that I didn't love Sissy.
I should also say that the synopsis of this book sounds a lot more fun than the reading experience of it actually is - largely I think this is because of the choice of form, which (while I love writers who place constraints on themselves) I just think makes the text often stodgy and needlessly opaque. I didn't hate it, and there's some great moments (the first "birthing" of Sissy is a fantastic "what the actual fuck am I reading" moment) but I felt that there's some squandered potential here.
Meanwhile, a group of leftist Polish intellectuals in London constitute the main sub-plots. One of them, Wassily, is attempting to find and take back to Poland the feet of several dead Polish ex-servicemen, each of whom had seven toes, so that he can bury and repatriate the feet. Another of the group embarks on an art project to ensnare unsuspecting men and record their sexual adventures.
All of this is narrated by a shape-shifting narrator with a foot fetish who lives in a houseboat, and it is all also written in rhyming sesta rima poetry, which lets Borek quote Eliot, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Larkin and plenty more besides.
There's so much for a reader to get excited about here, so much imagination and so many rich ideas at work about masculinity, the internet, art, the experience of Polish immigrants; but I should say that I didn't love Sissy.
I should also say that the synopsis of this book sounds a lot more fun than the reading experience of it actually is - largely I think this is because of the choice of form, which (while I love writers who place constraints on themselves) I just think makes the text often stodgy and needlessly opaque. I didn't hate it, and there's some great moments (the first "birthing" of Sissy is a fantastic "what the actual fuck am I reading" moment) but I felt that there's some squandered potential here.